ou think your matcha latte with six different adaptogens is peak wellness? Oh, sweet summer child. For hundreds of years, the hottest health trend in Europe wasn't a green juice or a crystal-infused water bottle—it was straight-up, no-joke, ground-up ancient Egyptian mummy. 🤢
Yeah, you read that right. While Gwyneth Paltrow is busy selling you a $75 candle that smells like her... opinions, your ancestors were literally raiding tombs in Egypt, grinding up the 2,000-year-old residents, and stirring them into tinctures to cure a headache. It's time to dive into the absolutely wild, completely unhinged history of medicinal cannibalism.
So, how did a whole continent collectively decide that eating the dead was a good idea? It all started with a massive misunderstanding in the 11th and 12th centuries. There was this stuff called "mumia," a natural black asphalt (bitumen) that oozed from a mountain in Persia. It was a legit folk remedy for things like broken bones and wounds. But then, translators saw that some Egyptian mummies were preserved with a similar-looking black goo. And that's when things went off the rails.
Suddenly, "mumia" didn't mean "mountain goo," it meant "mummy." The logic was... well, there wasn't much logic. It was a classic case of "looks the same, must be the same." This was combined with an already existing belief in Europe that you could absorb a person's strength and vitality by, you know, eating them. Romans drank the blood of gladiators, and even King Charles II of England sipped on a brew called "The King's Drops," which was made from... wait for it... powdered human skulls. So, when the mummy craze hit, Europe was already primed for some casual cannibalism.
By the 15th and 16th centuries, mummy powder was the hottest commodity in every European apothecary. It was the ancient equivalent of CBD oil—people used it for everything.
Ailment
The Mummy "Cure"
Headaches & Epilepsy
A spoonful of powdered human skull, maybe mixed with chocolate if you were fancy.
Internal Bleeding
A nice, dark tincture of crumbled mummy to stop you from bleeding out.
Gout & Wounds
A soothing rub-down with human fat. Yes, fat. From a person.
Nosebleeds
A pinch of Usnea, which was moss scraped from a buried skull. Because of course it was.
General Malaise
Just drink some fresh blood! The poor would literally line up at public executions to buy a cup of warm blood from the condemned. It was the original energy drink. 🤮
As you can imagine, the demand for high-quality, vintage pharaohs quickly outstripped the supply. This led to a booming black market. Tomb raiders in Egypt weren't just looking for gold; they were stealing its ancient occupants and shipping them to Europe.
When the real mummies ran out, the fakes started rolling in. Body snatchers would steal the corpses of executed criminals, beggars, and enslaved people, dry them out in ovens, salt them, and pass them off as authentic Egyptian mummies. It was a gruesome, unregulated free-for-all. Your expensive mummy medicine might not have been a 3,000-year-old priest, but a random guy who got hanged last Tuesday.
If eating mummies wasn't enough, Europeans also decided to paint with them. For centuries, one of the most popular pigments in an artist's toolkit was "Mummy Brown." It was made from ground-up mummy flesh mixed with resin and myrrh. Artists like Eugène Delacroix and Edward Burne-Jones used it to create their masterpieces. The story goes that when Burne-Jones found out what his favorite paint was actually made of, he was so horrified that he took the tube into his garden and gave it a proper burial. A little late for that, my dude.
Here's the wildest part. While Europeans were literally grinding up human remains and smearing them on their faces, they were also judging other cultures for being "savages." They condemned Native Americans for alleged cannibalism and called Catholics barbaric for believing in transubstantiation (the whole bread-and-wine-as-body-and-blood thing). The mental gymnastics required to see your own cannibalism as sophisticated medicine while calling everyone else's practices savage is a gold-medal flex in hypocrisy.
The mummy-eating craze finally started to die down in the 18th and 19th centuries as actual science began to take hold. But it didn't disappear overnight. Mummy was still being sold in a German medical catalog in the early 1900s, and the last known attempt to drink blood at a scaffold was in 1908. So next time you see a wellness influencer trying to sell you a new, weird health trend, just remember: it could be worse. It could be mummy.
1.National Geographic - "The gory history of Europeans eating mummies for health" A fantastic overview of how the mummy-eating craze started, peaked, and eventually ended. This is your go-to for the full timeline and the key players involved. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eating-medical-cannibalism-gory-history
2.Smithsonian Magazine - "The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine" Dive deeper into the specific medical uses of different body parts and the bizarre homeopathic theories that drove the practice. This one gets into the nitty-gritty of skull powders and blood marmalade. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/
3.Art UK - "The corpse on the canvas: the story of 'mummy brown' paint" For the art history nerds, this article details the creation and use of the pigment "Mummy Brown," including which famous artists used it and how they reacted when they found out its gruesome secret. https://artuk.org/discover/stories/the-corpse-on-the-canvas-the-story-of-mummy-brown-paint
